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Exploring Medium Access Control of SDR

-ALOHA with Power Saving-

Konstantinos Theodorou

RWTH Aachen University

February 2019
 I. INTRODUCTION
The goal of this project was to implement a power efficient ALOHA protocol. The nodes sleep in general.
During the sleeping state all RF communications (transmission or reception) are off. Controlled by a clock
they wake up after every sleeping period (in this case 1 second) and monitor the channel (idle state) for a
certain amount of time (100 or 200 milliseconds). When there is no activity, they switch back to the sleep
state.

At the time a node wants to send:

• The receiving node has to be awake before it can send its message
• It sends the first frame consecutively until the receiving node wakes up, notice the activity on the
channel and hence do not return to sleep mode
• The transmitting node sends its data
• After the transmission the node expects an Ack from the receiver
• They both return to the sleep state

Figure 1- Protocol Flow control

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 II. IMPLEMENTATION
A. SLEEP State
This state consists of one flat sequence structure with three frames. At first all the RF communications are
off, making sure the node cannot enter the other states. Then an internal clock is counting for a period of 1
second. After that, the node wakes up and goes to IDLE state to monitor the channel.

Figure 2- SLEEP State

B. IDLE State
A node stays in idle for a maximum of 100 or 200 milliseconds. It checks the Modulated Frame queue and
if has a frame inside ready for transmission, it moves to PACKET state. Otherwise goes back to SLEEP
state. In IDLE state there are also two structures only for certain cases. The first one is being executed if
previously the node has sent an ACK. This case is a small random waiting time with a maximum value of
50 milliseconds. The decision about the implementation of this particular case was taken after observing
the operation of the nodes in a real time scenario using USRPs. The other case has the purpose of moving
the state of the node to SLEEP after it has successfully received an acknowledgment.

Figure 3- IDLE State

C. TIMEOUT State
The node is entering this state after finishes transmitting DATA frame and it is waiting for an ACK frame.
If an ACK was received, the node leaves and enters the IDLE state. If a certain random period passes
without receiving an ACK the node tries to retransmit the frame. It is worth mentioning that for this specific

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implementation the number of retransmissions is higher than the usual number of the normal ALOHA
protocol. This happens due to the nature of the protocol to send consecutively the first frame until the
receiving node wakes up.

D. PACKET State
In this state the node transmits a data frame or an ACK frame adding an inter-frame interval to ensure better
performance of the protocol. If the node transmits data, it moves to the TIMEOUT state and If it transmits
an ACK to IDLE.

Figure 4 - Protocol Flowchart

1- After Tsleep = 1 second

2- After Tmonitor = 100 or 200 m
3- If Modulated Queue has something inside
4- After finished transmitting DATA
5- Not receiving an ACK after timeout period passed
6- After finished transmitting ACK
7- After receiving an ACK

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